Hose job: If KCNC is "Working 4 Women," as a current mailing announces, why is the station trying to get a leg up on the competition by suggesting that pantyhose is a crucial issue to female viewers? News 4 hyped its Monday night pantyhose "expose" with a glitzy four-color brochure urging local women to watch the ten o'clock news and then answer four questions about the segment, including this one: "Pantyhose became big sellers because of: A. The mini-skirt; B. The increase of women in the workforce; C. Their affordability; D. All of the above." (Hey, how about option E: Because commercial interests dictated that pants, tights, bare legs and equally run-free attire were "unprofessional.") Those who fill out the form correctly are eligible to win a 4-sponsored night on the town complete with theater tickets and dinner for two. What? No Mary Kay makeover?
Channel 4's pantyhose promotion could be a clue to the whereabouts of "lamebrained salesman Denny Setzwick," who's cited in an equally sizzling expose in the Weekly World News. The supermarket tabloid's Joe Berger revealed in a recent story datelined Denver that Setzwick specializes in do-it-yourself electroshock, zapping the blues away with a cattle prod. When contacted at the paper's offices in Florida, Berger said he got the story from a stringer in Denver, but an independent search for Setzwick has come up empty. Just remember, Denny: Like pantyhose, you can run but you can't hide.
Snag, snag, snag: Manhattan author Barbara Graham says she started writing to realize her life's dream: "to avoid wearing pantyhose on a daily basis and never, under any circumstances, go to a Real Job." Instead, her first book rides on the success of a Real Author: local psychologist and unexpected celebrity Clarissa Pinkola Estes, whose Women Who Run With the Wolves howled on the bestseller list for over a year. The press kit for Graham's anti-self-improvement spoof, Women Who Run With the Poodles, is filled with references to Wolves and even suggests that fans of Estes's--including several prominent female authors--forced Graham to find a new publisher (a charge that would carry more weight if the kit listed the correct publisher for Wolves: Ballantine). And one of the "suggested questions" that reporters ask Graham is: "Do you think Clarissa Estes and other New Age authors will read your book?"
"Arf," Estes answers, when Westword asks her.
Grease job: Still more evidence of why you should never say anything embarrassing in ink. On a recent Peter Boyles radio discussion of the proposed light-rail extension, the talk-show host wondered if his guest from the Independence Institute couldn't "smell the vaseline." Eavesdropping RTD director Robert Tonsing, not content with phoning the show in a huff, then sent Boyles an RTD analysis of the institute's critical report, along with the admission that "probably it was bad judgment on my part to call you, given the fact you had been characterizing the action by the RTD Board in the most vulgar of terms, in fact comparing it with sodomy."
All aboard!
